Google's Anti-Breitbart Plot: Employees Targeted Site’s Ad Revenue in 2017
GOOGLE’S
ANTI-BREITBART PLOT: Employees Targeted Site’s Ad Revenue in 2017
Emails
leaked exclusively to Breitbart News reveal that a group of Google employees,
with encouragement from the tech giant’s director of monetization, began
plotting the downfall of this website shortly after the 2016 election.
The group sought to strike at Breitbart News’ revenue by kicking
the site off Google’s market-dominating ad services. Although their efforts
ultimately failed, the discussion featured senior Google employees speaking
frankly about their reasons for targeting the site. These included unfounded
allegations of “hate speech” and “fake news.”
In the leaked emails, Google employee Richard Zippel advised a
fellow employee that Google would act against Breitbart News “at the site
level” if sufficient examples of “hate” were found. This kicked off a concerted
effort to find evidence of “hate speech” on Breitbart.
Another employee, David Richter, then forwarded Zippel’s email
to his colleagues, urging them to scour Breitbart for examples. Of course,
according to the far-left definitions used by Silicon Valley, even the term
“illegal alien” can be categorized as hate speech.
According to LinkedIn, Richter is now a technical lead at Google Cloud Storage, where he oversees privacy and security.
According to LinkedIn, Richter is now a technical lead at Google Cloud Storage, where he oversees privacy and security.
The Monetization Director
In the email thread that followed, Google’s Director of
monetization, Jim Gray, confirmed that his team had been monitoring Breitbart
News on a weekly basis “since the origin[al] fake news kick-off discussion.”
The comment, made in February 2017, was little over three months
since left-wing media kicked off the fake news panic – allegedly over
Macedonian bloggers publishing genuinely fake articles for clicks and ad
revenue.
Gray’s statement confirms that in Silicon Valley, conservative
media was a prominent target of the fake news panic from the very beginning.
For these Google employees, the chosen method of attack was Breitbart News’ ad
revenue – which like most websites on the internet, makes use of Google’s ad
services.
Gray’s
enthusiasm to blacklist Breitbart News also raises questions over how he
managed YouTube, where he also directed monetization according to his LinkedIn
profile. His time in that role overlaps with a period of widespread complaints about the unfair removal of ad
revenue from political channels on YouTube.
Instead of challenging the transparently political (the internal
discussion group was labeled “resist”!) effort to demonetize the web’s leading
conservative website, Gray instead sought to reassure the group that action was
being taken. Using the jargon-rich corporate talk beloved on Silicon Valley,
Gray hinted at efforts underway at Google to make it easier to strip ad
revenue from inconvenient websites.
“A Moral Argument”
The discussion was then joined by
Jeff Lakusta, head of technical support for Google’s ad-buying software.
Inviting colleagues to join a collaborative project, Lakusta said it would be
“tough” to prove Breitbart is hate speech only a “thorough” approach would
result in Google demonetizing the website.
As
Breitbart News previously reported, Lakusta would later follow up his
efforts by co-authoring an open letter to Google’s management,
demanding that Breitbart News be demonetized.
Later in the discussion, employees
directly involved in the policy area chimed in, including a member of the legal
team for AdSense, the Google platform relied upon by many digital publishers
for ad revenue.
The employee, Emily Garber then assured Google employees that
Breitbart was “very much on our radar.”
“There is obviously a moral
argument to be made as well as a business case,” chimed in another Googler
employee, Ryan Garza.
Garza’s LinkedIn profile reveals that he liaises directly with
Google’s large advertising clients to help them solve “policy and technical
issues.”
Emily Garber later returned to the discussion thread, where she
confirmed that the anti-Breitbart spreadsheet had been passed to Google’s trust
and safety team.
The Digital Ad Monopoly
Earlier this year, Breitbart News revealed that a cabal of
employees in Google’s ad department was directing the company’s ad clients to
the page of Sleeping Giants, a far-left organization that attempts to blacklist
conservative media organizations – including Breitbart News – by spreading
slander to their advertisers.
In the same report, Breitbart News revealed that Jeff Lakusta,
Pierre Fite-georgel, and Tim Chevalier had authored an open letter to Google’s
management formally requesting that Breitbart be demonetized. It now appears
that the letter was the tail-end of a long process within Google to smear
Breitbart as a place for “fake news” and “hate speech,” that began mere months
after the 2016 election.
Google
holds a dominant position in digital ads, accounting for 42.2 percent of the market in 2017 – more than double the
share of its closest competitor, Facebook.
Being
kicked off the service would be a major financial blow for any website – which
is no doubt why Google’s famously far-left employees worked so hard to make it happen.
Update — A Google
spokeswoman responded to Breitbart News’ request for comment with the following
statement:
We have extensive and very well
publicized policies for publishers who choose to monetize with Google ads. We
enforce these policies vigorously, consistently and without any political bias.
We regularly and routinely review sites in our ad network to ensure compliance
with our policies. These emails from early 2017 simply show the AdSense team
explaining that such a periodic review was underway.
Google did not answer Breitbart
News’ more specific inquiries, including whether the company has any formal
internal safeguards against internal bias.
Read the full leaked discussion below.
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